Jo Shapcott at Hay Festival 2011

I would quite like to be Arsenal's poet in residence, Jo Shapcott tells
Martin Chilton at Hay Festival.

A wet Sunday afternoon at the Hay Festival may not sound like the best place to sit for an hour and listen to a poet - but it was rather wonderful.

Jo Shapcott, who won the Costa Book Of The Year prize this year, was in the Summer House, with the rain gently falling on the canvas roof as she read aloud her own witty, warm and life-affirming poems.

She has such a turn of phrase: "You are a plump armchair in flight" and read poems about bees, trees and wees. The last, a poem about weeing on snow, drew loud laughs from the audience.

Shapcott, who teaches on the MA in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London, was generous in her praise of other poets - especially Elizabeth Bishop and Emily Dickinson. She talked openly about the problems of writing commissioned poems. One recent one was for a conference about risk - so she made risk into a dog in the poem Uncertainty Is Not A Good Dog. In the poem the dog "eats bracken and sheep s---". Yes, things can go wrong for us all.

Now having spent a few comedy concerts trying to avoid being singled out by a comic on stage, I wasn't expecting to be put on spotlight in the Summer House. But when Shapcott asked if there were any bald men in the house, I was the only one not hiding behind a wig. She preceded to read her poem Bald, celebrating the bald ("the air speaks to them differently").

Of course, the poem is dealing with her own experience of going bald during chemotherapy but I happily owned up to being part of the bald community.

In a chat afterwards Shapcott says that she sees poetry as "a vocation not a job" and says that her first poem was published in The South West Review when she was a teacher in Exmouth. Poetry is one of the true loves of her life - but isn't it true, I ask, that Arsenal is one of the others?

"Oh yes. I used to say that I would quite like to be Arsenal's poet in residence but that it wasn't really necessary because of Arsene Wenger's football."

Ah, but are you happy with him still?

"I am beginning to wobble over Wenger," she says. "I'm not sure Wenger's youth project is going to work. There maybe could be a kindly handover to Barcelona's Pep Guardiola."